"New" problems in Evolution (was Re: Translation problems)

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sön 2003-10-19 klockan 21.55 skrev Danilo Segan:
> Other programs which have eg. "Project > New", usually provide their  
> own "New" string, so it's in different gettext domains. Basically,  
> instead of using context markers, same strings are split into different  
> gettext domains. This might even be a good suggestion for big projects  
> which reuse the same string for many different stuff (and some, like  
> Gimp, already do it that way).
> 
> Because of this _limited_ reuse in Gnome project, I never really came  
> across troublesome strings. I may have payed not-close-enough  
> attention, but I'd certainly notice if it was a large-scale problem  
> (like that of ngettext :-).

One nototiously troublesome case is Evolution though, because it's a
very big application/domain, and "New" can mean so many things in the
big context of it. Even worse, Evolution makes this problem even more
apparent by grouping everything in a single "New" menu and a single
"New" button. "New" in Evolution can be either one of these (perhaps
even more):

New -> Mail Message
New -> All Day Appointment
New -> Contact
New -> Contact List
New -> Appointment
New -> Meeting
New -> Post Message
New -> Task
New -> Folder
New -> Shortcut
New -> Evolution Window

Swedish uses two genders and these messages would really need to be this
in Swedish:

Nytt -> E-postmeddelande
Nytt -> Heldagsmöte
Ny -> Kontakt
Ny -> Kontaktlista
Nytt -> Möte
Nytt -> Sammanträde
Nytt -> Postmeddelande
Ny -> Uppgift
Ny -> Mapp
Ny -> Genväg
Nytt -> Evolutionfönster

Of course, with the current design they can only use one of these
genders (the button currently says "Ny" in the Swedish translation)
which will be wrong in about 50% of the cases. :-(

And what's worse is that even a context system wouldn't really solve the
Evolution problem, because the fundamental problem is that there is only
one "New" menu entry. I've thought about this and a slightly better
solution would be to improve the menu contents to at least be
self-contained inside the "New" menu:

New -> New Mail Message			Ny -> Nytt e-postmeddelande
New -> New All Day Appointment		Ny -> Nytt heldagsmöte
New -> New Contact			Ny -> Ny kontakt
New -> New Contact List			Ny -> Ny kontaktlista
New -> New Appointment			Ny -> Nytt möte
New -> New Meeting			Ny -> Nytt sammanträde
New -> New Post Message			Ny -> Nytt postmeddelande
New -> New Task				Ny -> Ny uppgift
New -> New Folder			Ny -> Ny mapp
New -> New Shortcut			Ny -> Ny genväg
New -> New Evolution Window		Ny -> Nytt Evolutionfönster

This, while still keeping the design with one common "New" menu, would
at least make the text information more clear since at least the menu
entries can use correct language.

We should probably file a bug about this, as this is a fundamental
design problem in Evolution that affects every single language that has
genders.


Christian